Wednesday, May 14, 2014

The Indian Election Twitter Heat Map

The whole of India waits with bated breath for the final results of the country's general election. Most of the exit polls are predicting that the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is likely to be the biggest winner. However exit polls in India have often proved to be very inaccurate.

I prefer therefore to use the wildly inaccurate method of counting the number of Twitter mentions of the leaders of the three main parties (the INC, BJP & AAP) to gauge the popularity of each candidate. Luckily someone has created an animated heat-map showing the location of Tweets made around the world for each of the main party leaders between the start of this year and 13th May.

I'm a big fan of CartoDB's Torque library, which is capable of creating very powerful animated visualizations of large data sets. The India's Election: 2014 so far on Twitter map is one of the more impressive examples of a CartoDB Torque created map that I've seen. The use of different colors for each of the three party leaders results in a very impressive looking map, redolent of a Jackson Pollock painting.

Unfortunately amongst all this visual noise it is difficult to pick out any clear leader. So it is back to the exit polls for me.